Chief Innovation Officer

Job Title: Chief Innovation Officer

About the Company: Our client, the Italian subsidiary of the international market leader in the lighting industry, is seeking a dynamic and creative innovation personality to fill the position of Chief Innovation Officer. This role involves collaborating with the executive board to create a transformative culture of innovation across the entire organization.

Responsibilities:

1. Collaborate with the executive board to create a transformative culture of innovation across the entire organization.
2. Identify and leverage technology & design innovations to improve organizational performance.
3. Lead and develop the team, exercising full oversight of R&D, including strategic planning, operational processes, and close collaboration with sales and marketing.
4. Oversee and nourish an internal innovation ecosystem with innovation initiatives that promote the generation of smart ideas, fosters co-creation, and leverages collective wisdom by sharing best practices.
5. Create, install, and lead a creative and effective innovation process, ensuring that innovation is fostered and enabled and achieved in accordance with the company's mission and vision.
6. Liaise with the global innovation community, universities, and develop strategic relationships with other external resources to secure know-how leadership in smart/AI/connectivity/circularity and other forward-looking technologies.
7. Identify innovation opportunities and develop solutions, oversee and facilitate regular innovation sessions, workshops, and retreats, initiate special projects, manage quality control for external innovation initiatives, and support innovation-focused training, coaching, and mentoring.
8. Maintain current knowledge of market trends and technologies, advise management on future trends and up-front investments to ensure technology & design leadership.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in engineering, (industrial) design, architecture, or comparable.
• 5+ years experience in a leading innovation function, previous experience in related roles in the lighting/design/furniture sectors highly desired.
• Experience along the entire value-chain of specification-based smart technology projects from customer specification to product development and installation/maintenance.
• Strong track record in developing and leading creative-innovative technology processes and teams.
• Fluent in spoken and written Italian and English.
• Personality: full-blooded innovator with a technology & design guru mindset, curious and creative mind, reflective, courageous, and out-of-the-box thinker, change driver and diplomatic influencer, empathic and strong communicator, strong entrepreneurial mindset, customer- and team orientation, empowering and trust-based leader and decisionmaker, collaborative and playful creator, forward-thinking, pragmatic visionary with a passion for DESIGN, uncompromising in integrity, honesty, transparency, fairness, strong intercultural competence.

What Our Client Offers:

Excellent compensation package and direct reporting line to the Chief Executive Officer, extraordinarily creative, collaborative, and inclusive work environment & culture, hybrid work model - work location to be chosen freely across S/W Europe with regular travel to HQ (Marches/Ancona), strong professional growth and development perspectives in the international structure of the company.